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Colaterales/Collateral

Page 5

by Dinapiera Di Donato


  binding itself to her burning soles, folding over each stone she steps on

  stones crushed by overgrowth

  her neck as dispersing fog

  O viridissima virga, ave

  floriditatem tuam

  the weight of the grass fits on the tip of a stone

  Saint Jerome won’t come back to see her

  Seen by a good man

  who also forgets her

  Who will love you when death

  won’t want you any longer

  Then they all came back to the canvas

  SNOW FALLS CEASELESSLY ON THE SCREEN

  and my darkness fixed to looter’s gold is the rope

  it unfurls by the neck of the blessed maker of the enraptured

  strained by the vine

  on which the blessed climb up

  at the annual dance of those sitting

  for a photograph of Eden they commissioned

  the protocol calls for strict ranks of light

  the Quattrocento’s artificial paradise sways

  a canvas depicting a wreath of DNA and roses

  the kingdom’s crown

  a port at quarantine

  verdant night by the fields

  my darkness like a constrictor on your neck like a tree weighed by snow

  has unraveled

  TWO

  THE RAPTURE

  Between the Yea and the Nay the spirits take their flight beyond matter, and the necks detach themselves from their bodies.

  —Ibn al-’Arabi (Murcia, summer of 1165)

  AGAINST IBN ÀRABI

  Here I am all alone, quarreling with the age, both feet kicking the jugs of Being. Night vibrates with a litany of shadowless reflections. From its window the Absolute in profile contemplates its confines: the celestial sounds propagate through the old pond where metal and loam, past and ends, bone and vocable come to slake their thirst. Mud explodes and consciousness sails against the current. In this immense opacity of contemplation where air is the anticipation of darkness, I see the singular rise in multiples from the bottom of the amphora and wait in the cold of the real to be smashed. No need to step into a sea at the edge of which the prophets came to a halt, or crack open the world’s safe, for man to be the knot of creation and keep in his hands the Seal of future treasures. Creative in each one of us, the spark, no longer hoping to unite with the fires of heaven, becomes flame, spark of itself, mother of all ignitions, new lands. A drop flees the ocean, becomes ocean. The universe holds out a hand to the ephemeral.

  —Abdul Kader El Janabi

  (Baghdad, 1940)

  Spanish version translated by Eduardo Gasca from this English version by Pierre Joris.

  SERGEANT JOSANNA JEFFREY

  (as told to me by a student in my college Spanish class who came back from the front)

  Howls in the furnace

  is it not Janis Joplin?

  these are not concerts for suicidal dolls

  save yourself

  come over

  A year in Iraq is not a long time

  my Josanna, my breath, its fragrance of bamboo

  I would seize Josanna Jeffrey

  for more time in your arms

  the narrow wetlands of Mesopotamia

  Josanna Jeffrey with her silken legs

  luxurious black mittens

  a sacred Ibis, she remains

  in my sight

  My fear of a tattoo’s venom

  in the mind of the Stormfront cavalry

  lying in wait

  Josanna Jeffrey my keeper with glittering braids

  more beautiful than Central Park in winter

  tattooed with saffron

  by Christo

  Nineveh’s night under her helmet

  you’ll need the nail clippings

  you leave on my bed

  may the sky of Iraq protect you

  the sky of Iraq to spring from your branch

  just in time

  in friendly fire

  an armed Klansman on the Internet

  cares for the chamomile of his Aryan scalp

  when unnoticed

  the gutted dead with dark hair

  flee from his account

  I sense the venom of her rite burn by low flame

  She turns

  Leaps

  Josanna Jeffrey

  You are dark you are a heaven for kings

  queen of Baghdad my lover from the Bronx

  rustling of reeds eyes flaring as light breaks

  Josanna Jeffrey fires first

  come over

  I love her priceless kidneys

  lost

  to the Basra experiment

  hot days my tongue thrashing between your legs

  by a screen saver

  frigid

  like Mosul’s burn

  Bamboo cracked open on the air

  your breath of violets of menstruation

  Josanna Jeffrey

  lost interest in pharmaceuticals

  Your kidneys for thirty thousand dollars

  your violets

  nothing

  bound to the screen saver

  as in a womb

  rests in me

  I lick the inked arrow at my heart

  I let you suck

  all the pornography we have made

  to bring all the fragile heavens

  to safety

  loved flesh now decaying

  scattered over the dust of 10,000 archeological sites

  violet essence

  used just once

  to draw

  three drops of oil

  that animal

  set loose in the novice’s book

  one of my toes

  in your slit of bamboo

  how you liked it

  she said she’d come back and give birth to a daughter

  Nasiriya

  the birds never flew back either

  to keep you I play

  my hand Josanna Jeffrey:

  once upon a time the lovers

  were lost

  to friendly fire in

  each other’s war

  the survivors the blissful wretched girls

  devastated sent back by kings dead a year later

  howls in the furnace

  you withdraw your head

  like a golden turkey

  that has yet to be

  pricked

  Josanna Jeffrey

  with neither shame nor glory

  you do not come

  the last match

  is saved for the darkness

  THE SAINT, THE HOLY CRUSADE, THE KIDNAPING

  Enheduanna, Enheduanna, night with lexapro misses you

  huntress of visions you are smitten

  open the door, Oriundina que cai di ceu

  revisit Diana’s Tree your book of 20 years

  when Alejandra infiltrated girls’ speech and her love for them

  a concentration camp

  when

  libraries were full of fire

  and schemed to ease your hunger, your need, those minor wars

  and the word Chagall brought over from la Coruña had a name:

  Blanca Andreú

  but it is night in Manhattan

  between the Euphrates and Tigris

  where Eden stood

  the myth rises counting its sand

  at zero hour:

  counting landscapes one last time

  dissolving into oil wells

  counting burning towers

  the children at home

  are glad to count

  the serpents the souls

  nobody eases our anger

  our bread for supper is here

  there is no place in the world

  where we wouldn’t bite the dust, Enheduanna within walls

  at dawn

  our throats tighten

  the sands are gathering

  the sands are coming apart


  our dead will welcome our dead

  as though you and I

  have begun to forget ourselves

  BEG

  These are thoughts of refugees kept within themselves

  prisoners of the satellite’s beam

  of narcotic screens

  of the trader who kisses me by the frozen lake

  and instead of Scheherazade’s sleepless tales

  he lists cities real or imagined like

  figures from the Pentagon

  that will become exact:

  not all of us will die tonight

  Over there morning

  sings like a swan we cannot hear

  —No offense,

  But nobody understands the kitsch of distant sites

  or the jokes

  or the gods

  Golden birds in smoked vases

  dart into night, filling it with broken glass

  the beatings of the sirens and do not move

  from your post in the trap

  with controlled observation

  AN ATTACK ON THE CARDAMOM CAFÉ BEFORE WE SETTLE IN LIVERPOOL

  exchanging messages between Venezuelan immigrants without a home and the walls begin to lay out their virgins along the shore drowned by fear, drowned by grief

  Enheduanna

  the verdant girl of time

  the woman poet turns up to die at her Chagall

  Sounds of couscous and the sizzling mutton

  Joplin’s kitsch at home, sounds of

  Ismahan and Shakira before dyeing hair, sounds of

  your flamenco singers by the bar

  you share your Turkish baklava

  this shift’s polyglot losing sight

  of his passports

  the damages of errancy

  teaches you to write your name in Arabic

  in exchange for a memory of endangered gallinules

  purple

  tropicordiosos

  —No offense

  but nobody understands barbarian conflicts

  A Venezuelan girl in Liverpool

  weeps over the honey of mabrumeh

  scattered on the ground

  she’d plucked out the mint

  the winter

  her foreigner’s notebooks and Ávila’s violet shadow

  with whom she resides

  a vague explanation of her origins

  in spring

  her trust is of unexplained

  quantity

  as the grapes from Smyrna

  jewels in her saddened mouth

  while she writes in her banner:

  Please stop

  their facts, their no offense

  offend me

  Exchanging signals this time

  the bartering of childhood

  an ocean for another

  the mysterious blues within the air

  described by Da Vinci’s hand

  the corrosive wave of silence left by a swan

  a blue smear once it stops singing

  on the park’s frozen lake

  and a date palm at Basra’s end

  will be the last thing they remember

  by moriche palms where we waded in a dream

  of a friend, a poet

  who moved to Israel

  Meanwhile New York girls in springtime

  emerged from the museum’s hiding places with the Leicester codex

  where waters were veins in a live, ordered landscape

  war machines under a magnifying glass

  the design reveals bodies embracing

  like the sheltering manner of purple flowers

  turning off the news

  and their banners confused the enemy

  that everyone

  keeps at home

  MESSAGE FROM TEL AVIV: A VERDANT PRAYER

  There are princesses named after battles

  there are slaves who are makeup artists

  softening the roses

  of calligraphy

  both chew on pastry wings

  of the Nativity

  everything they touch

  escapes them

  as if to mock decrees

  MESSAGE FROM LIVERPOOL: A VERDANT PRAYER

  Always our garden

  leads to its own concentration

  camp

  and grass duets

  and Madonnas as beams in the forest

  live just a little

  in damsels

  who sway in the water of winter

  guarding jealously

  our Yugoslavian

  ashes

  VIRUS

  The dark caravans make way

  as migratory creatures with seasonal forms

  of killing

  for the benefit of vanguard technology

  of insurance companies

  and congregations swearing only God tends to lilies in the field

  and what’s a lily’s retail price?

  voicing their anger in the public’s ear

  “Why did you come to me from your Nevada desert, soldier armed to

  the teeth?

  Why did you come all the way to distant Basra

  where fish used to swim by our doorsteps?”

  Saadi Youssef (translated by Khaled Mattawa)

  cited the Jew, in Arabic, in his Carribean notebook

  —in reality, the handsome Yaakob Jacobito,

  lover of a Venezuelan student

  equally versed in basic Galician and Japanese

  as they wash dishes

  he thought of her

  more succulent than black avocados

  caretakers of the southern species of kukurto poems

  and she thought he would go well in a kukurtiño poem

  invincible manga figurines

  they are both drawing:

  boys remaining

  from all over

  thanks to the ancient fatalities of ancient abductions,

  jump lines from abductors’ to the army

  rank

  right here, where dying is to be called a fortunate hero

  and brings better dividends for the mothers of the little ones

  than working for an entire life, living

  without fortune

  They listen, very still, to

  diatribes manifestos sermons

  and burn

  with the whole library

  THE GENIUS

  All his life that Renaissance genius thought there was water

  on the moon

  where we once believed in the myth of the landing

  gentlemen, there is no water on the moon

  it is brimming with the bones of Africa

  the bright eyes

  of the dry moon

  an Oriental sage from the city

  loudspeakers in a protest:

  Unplug shut down

  Silence the Open Source

  Those astronauts never left the desert

  of Arizona

  Gentlemen, there were no men on the moon

  in the sixties

  Men and women and aliens, listen:

  keep away from areas designated for the protest, let’s go down another street

  presidents, vice presidents, dictators from the left, dictators from the right

  have already endorsed the contracts

  Baghdad’s partitioned and its main wells

  they find no time

  to see superproductions revolutions

  tasteless funerals

  on TV

  us either

  AND SCHEHERAZADE TELLS OF A ROSE’S SMILE —TRUNCATED MESSAGE—

  Death arrived

  and found me busy

  with your lips

  found you drawn with henna on your skin

  where we would be

  death and myself

  chasing ourselves blindly through the forest

  until you drew me

  the eye of a gazelle

  and her

 
a lion of the desert

  and in the palm of your hand

  the name of Allah

  an arrow to the heart’s tissue

  BASRAN TREASURES FOUND AT THE MET WHILE MIRBAD IS BEING LOOTED

  The heart’s anatomy

  is a serialized tattoo by Da Vinci’s hand

  set between the Tigris

  and your eyes

  Enheduanna in hymns

  volcanic Innana, limpid Alawana

  Sarasa

  lonesome spirits

  The Quattrocento is a study of robes

  the cold shell of an insect

  a reactor in a field

  where the silk of the body is threaded

  and its semblance of Madonna

  unfurls

  and it takes flight

  like a refugee from Basra

  in love with a young boy

  etched by a heaven of henna

  They had yet to erase the beautiful accident of birds

  because a commoner’s flesh

  is of less value

  and the sheltering beauty of a woman

  a transient prey

  left hanging in portraits

  Enheduanna

  Her glance toward Florence

  is master of a bird which takes flight

  and how in an ambush of light

  the white angel of a bombardier lies in wait

  And deliver us from mystifications

  Enheduanna Enheduanna Enheduanna

  THREE

  AT DORMITION’S SITE

  Seeds not only benefit from being dispersed, but also from inactivity. Many of them are incapable of germinating after being released by the plant and, therefore, remain dormant for some time. This state, which precedes germination, is called dormition and functions as a timer that allows a plant to sprout once conditions are favorable for the process of germination and survival, although, on occasion, a plant may remain dormant even if conditions for germination are favorable. This period functions as a link between one generation and the next and may last one week to 2,000 years as with the lotus.

 

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